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- Hi friends, how are you today? I hope you're having a wonderful day so far. Today is Monday, which means it's murder, mystery, and makeup Monday. If you're new here, hi, my name is Bailey Sarian, and on Mondays I sit down, I talk about true crime story that's been heavy on my
and I do my makeup at the same time. If you're interested in true crime and you like makeup, I would say subscribe because you can if you want to. But other than that, I will stop rambling because today's story
Interesting. Most of our story today takes place in a popular diner that was in Macon, Georgia, and it was a place called Lyle's. Now they served American comfort food. Sources online said it was hearty meat and potatoes. So...
Okay, Macon, Georgia wasn't a big place in the 50s. I mean, I guess still today, it's not the biggest. The population sits around like 150,000 today. Back in the 1950s, it was half of that. So when a diner this good pops up in a town super small, everyone knows about it, and that's
The spot. And that's exactly what this diner was, Lyle's. It was the spot. This is where people went to hang out, to talk with one another, get good food. You know, everyone knew each other. Great. And this diner is where we can find the
the tall, beautiful and charming young woman named Angette Lyles. Angette was born in Macon, Georgia in 1925. She came from like a very loving family. They were financially and economically stable. She went on to do very well in high school.
Nothing weird or off to be said about her and her upbringing. She had two brothers and plenty of friends from school who say that she and Jett was like very popular. Yeah, she was well-liked. Everyone would compliment her on her beauty. And she always had boys like lining up for her, wanting to take her out, wanting to talk to her. And when she left high school,
You know, it was the same thing. Everywhere she went, she received attention from men. She was blonde, she was tall, she was beautiful, and men were just like, "Ugh, let me get in that," you know? I think she liked it. I don't know. I wasn't there, but you get it. Great. So with all of that in mind, it's no wonder that local boy and World War II veteran, Ben Lyle,
takes notice of her beauty. Now he, Ben, had just returned from the war. It was said that he himself was actually a very great catch. He was young, he was handsome.
And that's like literally all I could, it's not funny. But when I like looked him up, you know, like his background, it was like, he was young, he was handsome. He was a World War II veteran and that's it. So that's really all I can say. It wouldn't take long for the two to hit it off. They started dating and then quickly got married. Angette was also ushered into the Lyle family business.
Oh yes, her new husband, Ben. Ben's mother ran the local restaurant and diner by the name of Lyle, Lyle's Diner. And Jett started working there in 1948 after she and Ben had their first child named Marcia. And just like everywhere else she went, and Jett was very popular with the customers. She was barely into her twenties.
but Anjette was considered like this new charming waitress at the diner. And everyone was like, you got to go and see her. She'll take real good care of you. You know, like people were coming in for the good food, but people were also coming in just to see Anjette and talk to her and flirt with her. She was known to sit at the tables with the customers and have like long conversations with them. And let me tell you, people just love that. They love
And Jett would occasionally bring her daughter, Marsha, into work with her. And like, since her mother-in-law owned the place, there wasn't any trouble. So it was great. And Marsha, the daughter, she was there so much that she ended up becoming like,
the restaurant's unofficial mascot. Like everyone knew Anjette and everyone knew her daughter and just everyone knew the family in town. It was great. So Anjette, she was working her butt off, her butt off at the diner for years, up until like 1951 to be exact. At this point, when she left her job, her husband, Ben, he had gotten sick.
he caught an illness overseas during the war and it wasn't getting any better. I guess it had left his throat like completely infected and he was in incredible pain every single day, according to Njet. The infection in his throat was so bad that the pain from it prevented him from working. Luckily for Ben, he had, or he had been receiving a military pension. So even though he was unable to work, luckily he was still receiving
an income from the military pension. Anyway, in 1951, Ben's government assistance, the pension, all that, it came to an end. His medical examiners determined that he was no longer unfit for work from his illness. And after three years of paying him or having his money come in, they decided to end it, to cut it off, which left him in quite the predicament.
because he hadn't been saving any money since he stopped working. And while Injet was working at the diner, Ben would spend his nights drinking and gambling. Oopsie. And wouldn't you know it, it's around then that suddenly the Lyle family is in quite a bit of debt.
It's believed that Ben had been racking up gambling debt from way back before the war, not to mention that he had been adding on top of that since he had been out of work. The debt had gotten so bad that Ben's mother, her name's Julia, make a little note of that, Julia decided to step in and help. I mean, it is her son, and she wants to help out, you know? So she decides to sell the diner.
Oh yeah, and then with that money, hopefully she can help her son get out of debt. Don't ask questions, just accept that this happened because Julia ends up selling the diner for $2,500. I know, it makes no sense. I have no idea why that happened and why so little, but she did. It was said it was really her only option and that selling it was the last thing she wanted to do and it was devastating for her, but...
The family's more important. Not only was this devastating to Julia, Ben's mother, but also to Anjette, who basically made this job at the diner like her whole world. Yeah, it was everything to her. So when she found out that the diner had been sold, she was outraged and disappointed. And it was said like this really put a wedge between her and Ben. Ben didn't even tell her what was going on. And she had to find out all of this once it had been done. Am I making sense?
Great. I hope so. Now what's wild is that almost right as the government took him off his benefits and doctors started to tell him like, "You're getting better. You can go back to work." Ben immediately got really sick again. Talk about bad timing because he'd already lost access to everything. But whatever was going on with him was getting way worse. And when he went to the doctors, they had no answers as to like,
what was going on and what the cause could be. They're like, "I don't know." Ben ends up being in the hospital for a little over two months. Again, no idea what's going on. He's just like really sick. He's having terrible nosebleeds and his body would like shake, convulse, is that the word? Around his bed. And then in January of 1952, he fell into a coma. I know, I don't know. Then a few weeks later,
Ben still in the hospital, still in a coma. Sadly, he died having never woken up. So this is devastating news for Anjette, right? And now on top of this, like she has no income from herself or from Ben and she doesn't know what else to do. So she moves back in with her parents. Slash make up.
During this time, 1952 to 1955, Anjette was working at a different diner, at a different restaurant, but it was pretty much the same thing. Like, she would bring her charm, she would serve up the customers like she used to, but this time she was hustling hard and she was saving her money for years. And then in 1955, after saving her money, she goes back to the new owners of Lyle's Diner and she buys it back from them.
Oh, that's right. Good for her. I mean, she hustled hard and she bought it for $12,000 and, and Jet was happy. She literally got her job back as a waitress and she also rehired Ben's mother and like hired the same people, which is great. I just thought that was not, that was great. Like that's,
That takes a lot of hard work and discipline. And she figured after having spent so much time, effort, and money on getting control back of the restaurant, she deserved to rename it. Thus, Anjuts was born. She renamed it Anjuts. So rebrand, Hanukkah.
hired the same team, but it was kind of like the diner had never changed. All of the customers got word that she was, and Jett was like back running the diner now, and all of those who used to visit her from her early 20s, you know, they all came back. It was great. I have to acknowledge that it's fast, right? Owning and operating, not even mentioning, like buying out your own restaurant in the 50s as a woman, right?
A widow? That's pretty badass, Enjet. You go, girl. Too bad the story's about murder though, so not so much about everything else, but like that part. I wanna root for you, but like I can't. Anyway, her restaurant is taking off.
Customers are happy. Now she's happy because she got her favorite job back. Everything's coming up for Anjette, including her own personal life. There was a man who kept coming by the diner and he caught her eye because he was like this handsome man.
She's like, what do you do? And his name's Joe, Joe Gabbert. But everyone called him Buddy. So that's why I'm going to call him too Buddy. He was a pilot. And the two of them were really flirty with each other. And before the end of 1955, the two had gotten married. It just...
Real quick. Apparently sometime during that year, the two of them went on vacation together to Texas and New Mexico. And when they came back, they announced to the family and everyone that they had gotten married. Which again, to everybody, it felt like, oh, okay. Like you guys just met each other. All right.
Like a lot of people just did not, they didn't really support this marriage, but it is what it is, none of their business. And again, this is a really small town. So everybody in the community is like talking amongst each other and they're all like, did you know that Ange got married?
I know, but that was just the beginning of what the residents of Macon would soon be whispering about. And Jack, see, like I said, Buddy was a pilot. And that meant that Buddy wasn't around too much. And Jack kind of liked that. Again, she was kind. She was an accommodating woman. And it wasn't long before rumors started up.
Start spreading around town that Miss Anjet was sleeping around behind Buddy's back. Mm-hmm. Now, there was no evidence to back it up, to be fair. But it doesn't matter because there was something they did know for sure about Anjet. Something people loved talking about. You see Anjet? She was known to be into...
- Witchcraft, yep, of course. The whole Macon County is like, "Aunt Jett's into witchcraft, she's a witch." I know, it comes out of like nowhere. So apparently Aunt Jett would just like go see the local psychic quite often and people would see her doing this and they're like,
She's weird. And then some people or some of Anjette's employees, they came forward and said that they would see her in the back of the diner surrounded by a bunch of candles and voodoo dolls as if she was performing some kind of satanic ritual. No one knows if that's true either, but okay. Anyway, as rumors of Anjette's character began to spread,
tragedy struck once again in October of 1955, the same year she got married to him. Buddy, her brand new husband,
He fell ill. When he fell ill, he had just come back from the hospital where he had surgery done on his wrist. Now it was said that this surgery was like very minor and there was literally nothing to be concerned about. So they sent him home. But soon after, like a rash had developed on his wrist and then he got a fever and then he fell very, very ill.
So they go back to the hospital. Doctors couldn't figure out like what was happening. Buddy's sick, I don't know. And then it wasn't long until Buddy was also hospitalized just like Ben, weird. And then after being in the hospital for about a month, sadly Buddy died. Doctors knew nothing about what had killed him and they had no answers. Now, because they have no answers,
The doctors, they go to Anjet and they're like, "You know, we would like to do an autopsy, but we need to get your approval." So they're trying to tell her like, "We should do an autopsy. We can get you some answers, figure out what killed him." And Anjet says, "No, no, I don't want to do that." She said Buddy would never want his body cut up. So no autopsy was performed and Buddy's death would remain a mystery.
for a little while anyway. So Buddy is barely buried and Anjet over here is already filing to have her name changed back to Lyle. Like I guess within months, she is back to being Anjet Lyles, which, you know, we can't judge fully, but...
We're judging. And of course, Anjette over here, she moved even faster to get Buddy's life insurance payout. Oh yeah, baby. He had a life insurance policy on himself. And with the funds, it was said that Anjette, she bought herself a new house, a brand new Cadillac. She's just flexing on all these hoes in town. This new house of hers had a lot more space.
So she ends up inviting her mother-in-law, Julia, to start living with her and the children. And this was like shortly after Buddy had died. Now everyone in town was like, wow, that's so nice of Anjette. Like she's taking care of her mother-in-law. Like that's so sweet of her. Her mother-in-law just lost her son. Like what an angel, you know? But behind closed doors, there were rumors that the relationship between Anjette and her mother-in-law, Julia, was
was a little rough to say the least. Julia was a woman of a certain age where a will should definitely be considered. And I guess Angette felt like it was her responsibility to pressure Julia into writing a new updated will. And Julia
Julia would tell Anjet that she really did not want to think about her own death and she didn't want to do this well so she kept putting it off. And I guess that made Anjet like a little nervous because Julia still had another son that was alive and if Julia died without a will, everything would probably go to that damn son. And Anjet's like, what about me? I took you in.
What do I get? She's only thinking of herself here. Hey, weird thing though. You see, in 1957, while still living with Anjet, Julia got super sick.
And then Jett's like, "I don't know, man, like super unrelated. Like how could this be weird?" But seriously, like Julia got really sick. She fell very ill and she went straight to the hospital. In my opinion, Julia is probably like, "Oh my God, I have whatever the hell my son had or something." Because she went straight to the hospital. She didn't wait or anything. She was like, "I'm not gonna sit around and wait
until this gets worse, I'm gonna just go to the doctors right now." And she did. And Jet would go and visit Julia quite often, like throughout the week and whatnot. She would bring her meals on a daily basis from the family diner. And the nurses were like, "Oh my God." And Jet's so sweet, wow, we love her, that's so nice. But sadly, in September, Julia would die in the hospital from unknown causes, just like Ben.
Just like Buddy, no answers. Nobody knows what happened, nothing. But Anjet's like, "You guys, guess what? "Guess what I just found, Julia's will." Yeah, that's right, Anjet brought out Julia's will. Like after announcing that she had died, Anjet was like, "Oh, I just, I found her will. "It was in Julia's handbag, isn't that wild?"
She's like, "Wow, talk about good luck, that's crazy." Now, according to this will that Angette found, it left a third of her assets to her son, another third to Angette, and the final third to her grandchildren, which basically meant it was going to Angette since they were Angette's children. So good for her, I guess. So people in town naturally talking, and a lot of them are like, "I don't know about Angette, okay? Everyone seems to be dropping flies around her."
Isn't anyone thinking that's a little suspish? So back at the diner, all of a sudden customers, they start paying closer attention to how Angette would interact with her children, how she would interact or act when Angette thought nobody was watching her, you know? And it was said on several occasions that Angette would appear to be taking out her frustrations
like out on her nine-year-old daughter, Marsha. Some people said they saw Angette screaming at her, verbally abusing her. And many wondered like, well, if this is going on here at the diner, like what's going on behind closed doors? And like, that's totally fair. But also I was like, why didn't someone say something when they saw that? But again, I don't know. It was the 50s. People are weird. That's my conclusion. Some time passes and guess what?
Marsha got sick, the nine-year-old daughter, yeah. Marsha falls ill and she was taken to the same hospital and she was put in the same hospital room, weird, as Julia, mother-in-law, grandmother, mother, right? And buddy. So they died in that room. Now Marsha's in that room. And then Jett told people like,
I just have this bad feeling. I feel like this is a bad omen. Like, can we move her to a different room? For a while there, Marsha's condition was not looking good. And then just like Ben, she started to kind of get better. And the doctors went to Anjet and they were like, oh, guess what? Great news. Your daughter, she's doing a lot better. She's recovering and she's gonna be okay. We believe she's gonna be okay. And Anjet,
Her response to the doctor was like, no, she's going to die. She is going to die. Like I see it. The psychic told me, whatever, she's going to die. You probably wouldn't say that about your own kid unless you're all fucked up. So yeah. Anyways, Angette had believed this so much that she had already ordered her daughter a coffin. Literally, like while her daughter Marsha was sitting in the hospital bed,
And Jett was ordering a coffin, some like in memorial, just funeral shit, okay? Mm-hmm, do I need to say anything? No. And then it was said that Jett went around Marsha's, her hospital room, and she was removing like all of the get well cards and the flowers. And when asked like, why are you removing all that? She said that she wouldn't be needing them anymore.
What a psycho. But in April of 1958, almost according to schedule,
nine-year-old Marsha had died in the same hospital bed as her stepfather, yeah, her stepfather and her grandmother. And let me tell you, this was the last straw for the residents of Macon County. I don't know how someone could kill their own child. That will never make sense to me. Like how? I don't know. So after her daughter had died in the hospital, the fourth death in her family in just six years, rumors about Angette had hit an all time high. Everyone in town had turned on Angette
and Jett, which makes sense because like you can't be mad at that, right? For good reason. Stories of how she responded to her daughter's death were like swirling around saying that, you know, she wasn't showing any emotion. She didn't shed a single tear when she was sitting next to her dying daughter. Like the whole thing was just suspicious, right? Now this time is different though. Coroners, they end up performing an autopsy on Marsha
But unfortunately, this led to no answers. They didn't find a damn thing. Now, by this point, police were beginning to look into Anjette, thanks to her own employees who had gone to police and were like, let me tell you about Anjette. So Anjette, she had restaurant staff, but also she had like a personal housekeeper for her own home. While this housekeeper had been talking to Anjette's employees at the restaurant.
And I guess the housekeeper found a bottle of ant poison in the house. Now this ant poison was bought specifically for the restaurant because Angette swore up and down that they had this huge ant infestation. Mind you, the bottle of ant killer stuff poison is pretty big. Like it was like a company size bottle.
Anyways, there was an employee who said that there had not been any type of ant infestation, nor had anyone heard Anjet bring this up in the first place. Nobody's talked about it. Ants, what? When? You know? So it seemed a little odd. Odd enough for one restaurant employee to reach out to the coroner and tell them like, hey, you should maybe like look out for poison or something. I don't know.
Click, you know, just like drop that little fun fact. One of the employees had reached out to police and told them that they believed Angette had used the ant poison to perhaps, I don't know, maybe, perhaps, possibly misuse it and poison Angette.
her whole family with it, not making any allegations, just suggesting that this could be a possibility. And honestly, I really enjoy the teamwork. I love that teamwork. Great work, you guys, working together, trying to get this girl, this woman,
removed from the streets. That's great, everyone's working together and stuff, but then I was thinking like, why aren't police, why aren't police doing that work? You know how it goes. Anywho, so they're putting the pieces together, they're passing on this information. The coroner went out and got the exact bottle that was believed to be the one Angette was using. And after looking at the ingredients, he saw that it contained arsenic. Oh shit. Now, if you don't know what arsenic is, let me tell you.
Well, I don't know, but I do know that it's a chemical element and it can also kill you. Oh, and it will leave a trace in your system if you know what you're looking for, but you have to know what you're looking for. Like for the most part, most coroners can miss it. I don't know what they're looking for, but they're like, you get it. Anyhow, so that's why they had found nothing in Marsha's system, it's believed. In order to do this, to find out if it was arsenic or not,
the coroner needed a certain type of equipment. So unfortunately, they did not have the equipment, the proper equipment, in order to help them determine if Marsha was poisoned. So Macon, they end up shipping her body off to a town nearby who had the proper equipment. And hey, guess what? They found traces of arsenic in there. Oh, shit. Yep.
And Jen, you got some explaining to do. Anyhow, once Marsha's death was confirmed to be from arsenic, the police, obviously, they're now involved. Police were curious to know if they'd also find traces of arsenic in Ben, Buddy, and Julia. So all three of their bodies were exhumed.
And hey, would you look at that? They found arsenic all up in their insides. It was clear as day that they all died from arsenic poisoning. We're looking at you, Angette. So police decided to arrest Angette after it was discovered that literally everyone who had died near her had all died from arsenic poisoning. So...
Their suspicions were clear. They had four bodies worth of evidence. And, well, just the fact that Anjette was acting kind of suspish after the fact. They noticed that she had been benefiting from the life insurance policy from her husband and the will from her mother-in-law. And she also had life insurance on her daughter. Yep, so Anjette is just making money one person at a time.
So making matters worse for herself, police interviewed some of the hospital staff who cared for all of Anjette's relatives. It's just like, she should have been arrested a long time ago, right? I would think after like person number two. Just me? Okay. But they ended up telling police that, you know, Anjette would come in. She would often bring food for the family members from the diner. Some of the nurses remember it being like,
really cute, remember? I'm like, oh my God, wow, that's so nice. But there were other nurses who remembered fighting her on this. Like, you cannot bring outside food in here. We have food for them. They are good. But, and Jet would just, she wouldn't give it up. Eventually the nurses were like, fine, whatever lady, like,
give them your damn food. But another key detail that police learned from the hospital staff was that before Anjet gave them their diner comfort food, she would always kind of like walk off to the bathroom with the food alone. I know. Do you think she was po-- Yes, she was poisoning the food. Of course she was. What else was she doing? She's bringing them food. I don't know why she didn't poison before she brought the food, but
Okay, she would get the food go to the bathroom and poison beep-bop-boop bring it back. Be like sweetie I brought you food. I hope you like it and she would do this a couple times a week She was bringing them the poisoned food and it was happening in small amounts, you know And with that repeating and building up in their system, that's what eventually killed them It was like a slow build that killed them. Could you imagine? Well and yet she would be
plead not guilty to all of this. Honestly her court trial was just a freaking joke. She stupidly thought it would be best to represent herself so she could speak to the court directly instead of having a lawyer someone in the middle. She's like if I just talk to them they'll believe me.
So she goes in there and she makes some like lengthy statement where she explains like how heartbroken and torn up she was over this whole thing and you know, how she could never imagine hurting her family. So Anjette, she did offer up one single piece of evidence to back up her claims, just one. Anjette in court showed up with a letter written by Julia, her late mother-in-law. Oh yeah.
Now, according to this letter that Miss Julia wrote, it said that Julia was the one who had poisoned Ben, who was her own son, and also Buddy before poisoning herself over the weeks and weeks and weeks. That's what this letter said, that she had killed everyone. Julia.
It was all Julia's fault. So Angette, again, she had this piece of evidence. Angette told her maid to pretend and say that she's the one who found the letter in one of Julia's handbags. She's like, yeah, tell them. And like, how do we know this happened? Well, her maid ends up taking the stand and literally tells everybody, Angette wanted me to lie. She wrote the letter from Julia. The whole thing was fake. And
and she wanted me to come up here and lie. Like she put her on blast. And honestly, that must've been amazing. I would have loved to see Anjette's face. She probably was pissed. Well, the jury would end up deliberating for just an hour before coming back and sentencing Anjette to death.
in the electric chair. Naturally, Anjette, she appealed the sentence, but that didn't go her way. But a committee did end up like reviewing her case
and had her take or had her like sit down with a doctor and stuff. And they found out that she was schizophrenic, which meant that the death penalty would no longer be applied to her case. I don't know whose wiener she sucked for that one, but okay. Okay. Because look, I did some like digging around and it was said like this doctor may have been, like, I don't know. The whole thing was weird. It was a little weird, but...
Whatever. Well, once this happened, instead of going back to prison, Anjette would be sent to a mental hospital where she would stay until her death in 1977 when she was 52 years old. Now my favorite part, well not my favorite part, but I think this just goes to show like that Anjette was smart because one of her friends from the inside, inside the mental hospital,
said that her and Anjette became very close. And Anjette told her that she would never allow herself to be classified as sane or quote unquote cured of her mental illness. If somehow that happened, she would have to face the consequences of her murder. And Anjette just couldn't have that. Nay, nay. I mean, we know Anjette's guilty. She stood by the fact that she was innocent, but
No girl, like come on. Yeah, I don't know what happened to the kids. I hope they lived happy long lives. But other than that, yeah, I mean, Angette's just a piece of work. All that for some money, huh? Mm-mm, mm-mm-mm. Damn shame. But other than that, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. You make good choices and I'll be seeing you guys later. Goodbye.